Black Lives Matter: a square for the altar frontal
Through our Hampstead Parish Church in Exile project, we’re collecting fabric squares for an altar frontal responding to the question, ‘Where is God in the pandemic?’ Margaret Pritchard-Houston is kindly putting these together into an altar frontal. This will be displayed in church in the summer. The deadline for finishing a fabric square is 15 June – you still have a little time if you’d like to make one! Contact Jeremy by email to let him know when you’d like to drop it off at the vicarage.
I’ve made this one in honour of George Floyd, the man who was murdered by a police officer in Minnesota on 25 May. His funeral was on Tuesday 9 June. His death has led to a huge surge of protests, activism, and cries for an end to racism. Black lives matter. We are all caught up in a damaging societal system of oppression that does untold violence. But change is possible.
As we’ve seen in Bristol and elsewhere, as statues of those who bought and sold enslaved people are coming down, it is time for real change. Not just words, but action that resonates with a promise of repentance and a commitment to work for liberation.
These recent weeks of our shared experience of the pandemic have also been weeks of bearing witness to this urgent need for anti-racist action and for genuine change.
In response to George Floyd’s funeral, the black American theologian Cornel West said:
I saw in the hearts and minds and souls not just of the Floyd family but of the church, the preaching, the music, the love – not one reference to hatred or revenge – it was all about love and justice….A people who’ve been hated, chronically, systemically, for 400 years, have taught the world so much about love and how to love….We’ve got a love that the world can’t take away.’
‘We cry,’ he said, ‘because we are not numb on the inside.’
Black lives matter. Where is God in the pandemic? On the side, and deep in the heart, of justice, love, and liberation. That’s where God always is.